What’s New in 2012 R2: Cloud-integrated Disaster Recovery (DR)

  • Article

Disaster can strike anywhere at any time. Ask any business owner in New Orleans about the importance of Disaster Recovery (DR). You can bet Katrina left an indelible impression on the importance of redundancy, backup, duplication, hot site, etc. It is an important subject and lessons learned can be harsh.

This week Microsoft VP Brad Anderson and  Microsoft Principal Program Manager Vijay Tewari detail the disaster recovery innovations in, “What’s New in 2012 R2: Cloud-integrated Disaster Recovery”.  Disaster Recovery (DR) is a poorly served market – the solutions are complex to deploy, they require extensive configuration, and they do not work at cloud scale. Since current solutions fall short of addressing DR needs due to their cost and complexity, workloads in need of protection are left vulnerable, and this exposes businesses to a range of compliance and audit violations. Moreover, because so many of these solutions are built using components from multiple vendors, any attempt to provide simplicity through a single pane of management is impossible.

In Windows Server 2012 R2, HVR introduces some key enhancements around variable replication frequency, support for near-sync, and extended replication. We have also addressed how to provide HVR management and orchestration at scale. Towards this goal, we have released Windows Azure Hyper-V Recovery Manager (HRM), Microsoft’s cloud-scale DR solution. HRM is currently in limited preview and will be broadly available in the near future.

There are many more details in this post so spend a few minutes reviewing it.  For those of you wanting to take the next step and are interested in downloading some of the products and trying them, here are some resources to help you:

  • Windows Server 2012 R2 Preview download
  • System Center 2012 R2 Preview download
  • SQL Server 2014 Community Technology Preview 1 (CTP1) download
  • Windows 8.1 Enterprise Preview download

As always, follow us on Twitter via @MSCloud!  And if you would like to follow Brad Anderson, do that via @InTheCloudMSFT !